Several weeks after Kress read Pat Price onto the classified program, the latest URDF-3 reconnaissance data was rechecked. “Two derricks were partially disassembled, but basically all four were visible,” Kress wrote. “Because of the mixed results, the operational utility of the capability [i.e., remote viewing] was considered questionable but deserved further testing. Since I was judged to be a potentially biased advocate of paranormal functioning, the testing and evaluation of Pat Price would be transferred to a more pragmatic OTS [Office of Technical Services] operations psychologist.”
The situation was baffling. “There are observations… that defy explanation,” Kress wrote. The only thing easily understood was that the study of extrasensory perception was fraught with strong opinions and stronger reactions: “There is no fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of paranormal functioning and the reproducibility remains poor.” Some of the most pragmatic, commonsense thinkers found themselves uncertain. Others would become unhinged.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Unconscious
In the early days of the Cold War, back in April 1953, CIA director Allen W. Dulles gave a now famous speech at the National Alumni Conference of the Graduate Council of Princeton University alerting America to the communists’ most powerful secret weapon: brain warfare. “Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis, but responds to impulses implanted from outside,” Dulles declared. To achieve this goal, Dulles said, the communists were running single-target programs such as the brainwashing of captured prisoners of war in Korea. The ability to influence key leaders or small groups of people through some kind of thought-influencing operation was also seen as a viable threat. One individual who continued to interest the CIA in this regard was Uri Geller.
Declassified documents show that CIA analysts were concerned by an ability of Uri Geller’s they called “mind projection,” a unique ability whereby “he ‘forces’ the researchers to name a city previously written down, by him, with apparently a high order of accuracy,” wrote an analyst with the Office of Research and Development. Geller’s posse of critics declared him a fake and a fraud, but declassified documents indicate that the CIA did not necessarily agree. “It may prove worth while to explore pursuing some carefully controlled experiments with Geller over and above the experiments TSD [Technical Services Division] is funding,” suggested the ORD analyst, albeit with much tighter controls. After New Scientist ran a sixteen-page story on Geller, accusing him of possibly wearing “a radio receiver that can be concealed in a tooth,” the CIA had Geller’s mouth examined by a dentist who found no sign of an implant. When the magician James Randi speculated that Geller’s assistant and friend Shipi Shtrang helped him cheat, the CIA denied Shtrang access to Geller during the experiments. According to “Special Management Guidelines for the SRI Paranormal Project,” stricter controls would now include: “strip-down (removing rings, wristwatches, etc.) and put on a special lab garment (jumpsuit); X-Rays done on a spot basis during experimentation… limited to the chest, hands and skull; ultra-sound.”
If Geller could plant a word in a person’s mind through “mind projection,” he could ostensibly influence that person’s actions, and that idea was of national security concern to CIA. There was also mounting evidence that Geller’s alleged powers produced secondary effects. A scientist with the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences agreed. “Perhaps the most important consequence of the Geller craze [is] that a number of less celebrated individuals, particularly children and teenagers, reportedly [are] able to bend metal after watching Geller do it.”
Which is what happened on November 23, 1973, after Geller walked into a London radio studio for a live on-air experiment with a veteran British broadcaster named Leslie Ronald “Jimmy” Young. BBC Radio 2’s Jimmy Young Show had an audience that extended throughout England and into Ireland and Scotland. After Geller arrived, Young welcomed him to the BBC and suggested they get started right away. A few minutes into the interview, Young took out a large key identified as an Automobile Association telephone-box key from his pocket and asked Geller to bend it. “I did what I usually do, laying my hand over the key and wishing it to bend,” wrote Geller in a 1975 memoir. Geller was nervous, he said, having recently been unable to demonstrate psychokinesis on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, but today there was excitement in the air. A group of radio engineers had left their booth and gathered around Geller to observe. With his hand over the key, Geller concentrated. He told people all over the United Kingdom that they should summon their own psychokinetic powers at this exact moment and bend metal in their homes—spoons, forks, keys, anything. “If there are any broken watches in your house, please concentrate on them and try to make them work,” instructed Geller. After a few moments of concentrating on the audience, Geller took his hand away from Jimmy Young’s key.
Live on national radio, Jimmy Young shouted out, “It’s bending right in front of me, I can’t believe it!” There was clapping and cheering throughout the studio. Young spoke of how crazy it was to be sitting in the BBC studio and watching metal bending right in front of him, as if it were alive. A producer rushed in and handed Young a note. Then an engineer ran in with a message, and after that another radio producer came forward with a handful of caller notes. Someone shouted, “The entire BBC switchboard is lit up like a Christmas tree!”
Calls came into the station from all over, Young announced on the air. Across the United Kingdom citizens were reporting metal objects in their homes inexplicably bending. A woman in Surrey said she’d concentrated and her gold bracelet bent. A woman in Harrow said she was stirring soup while she was concentrating and now her soup spoon was bent. A watchmaker called up to say the hands on one of his clocks, frozen for years, were moving again. People wanted to believe in psychokinesis, and now apparently many of them did. This was what the CIA called secondary consequences. All over Great Britain, people believed they had bent metal with their own minds.
Still in London the following night, Geller appeared live on BBC television. On the Dimbleby Talk-In show he bent and then broke a fork, started a broken watch, and reproduced a drawing hidden in a sealed envelope. Seated beside him were two scientists he did not know, King’s College professor John Taylor and South African zoologist and anthropologist Lyall Watson. Both scientists expressed wonder. “I believe this process,” declared Professor Taylor, “I believe that you actually broke the fork here and now.” Variations on what the CIA’s Ken Kress called “conversion moments” were now happening on live TV.
The following day, as part of a psychokinesis experiment for the British tabloid newspaper Sunday People (estimated circulation three million), Geller agreed to concentrate hard at 12:30 p.m. London time, and to shout out the word “Bend!”
“I was at Orly Airport in Paris at the time,” Geller recalls. “I concentrated hard starting at 12:15, in an attempt to send thoughts and energies across the Channel… At exactly 12:30, I shouted, ‘Bend!’” Reader reports flooded the newspaper’s offices. The following day, the newspaper printed a tabulation of readers’ results: “Clocks and watches restarted: a total of 1,031; forks and spoons bent or broken: a total of 293; other objects bent or broken: a total of fifty-one.”
Overnight, Uri Geller became front-page news, across England and throughout Europe. The media referred to Gellermania as a force akin to Beatlemania. Cover stories about him appeared in Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Norsk Ukeblad, and Apu. Geller was invited to give demonstrations in Japan, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Holland, and Norway. From defense officials to religious leaders to celebrities, powerful individuals wanted to see for themselves whether Geller’s abilities were real. In Oslo he was invited to the home of Alv Jakob Fostervoll, the Norwegian minister of defense; in Italy he met with the archbishop of Florence; in France he was a guest of Brigitte Bardot. In America, meanwhile, a group of prominent scientists formed a coalition to discredit him.
The cosmologist Carl Sagan was particularly offended by the public’s acceptance of Uri Geller. Together with Martin Gardner, Ray Hyman, Paul Kurtz, and James Randi, the skeptics created the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal to make their position known. “The more serious-minded among us are starting to ask, what is going on?” wrote Sagan. “Why the sudden explosion of interest, even among some otherwise sensible people, in all sorts of paranormal ‘happenings’? Are we in retreat from the scientific ideas of rationality, dispassionate examination of evidence and sober experimentation that have made modern civilization what it is?” Sagan and his colleagues expressed anger over the fact that any American scientist would waste time studying extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. It was the duty of their committee, he wrote, to force a confrontation between what he believed was a battle between “the rational and the irrational.” Sagan lamented, “In the past, the raising and answering of such questions has been left to commentators and journalists. This time around, however, some scientists are beginning to fight back.”
Fight back as their group would, it had no bearing on the decisions made at CIA. The Agency continued its research in paranormal phenomena in general, and Uri Geller in particular. Geller’s actions and his purported abilities had real-world consequences, rational or irrational. Nowhere was this more evident than in a bizarre series of happenings in late 1974. They involved Geller and a small group of nuclear weapons engineers who worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of two nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States. The CIA closely followed the situation. It was, and remains, cause for alarm.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is located in Livermore, California, roughly thirty miles east of the Stanford Research Institute. In keeping with its mission statement, “pushing the frontiers of nuclear weapons design and engineering,” in the mid-1970s Livermore scientists were developing new nuclear warheads and designing emerging-weapons technologies that included classified laser systems and high-performance computers. Among these scientists and engineers was a small group closely following the Geller phenomenon. If Geller’s psychokinetic abilities were genuine, this group wanted to know whether, and under what circumstances, these abilities might be a national security threat to their work.
Scientists and researchers working with Geller at SRI had reported that both inside and outside the lab, strange things sometimes occurred. Otherwise reliable equipment malfunctioned when Geller was around. Objects disappeared, then reappeared. Computers crashed. Magnetic tape became demagnetized. There was precedent for this kind of occurrence; scientists called it the Pauli effect, named after the theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli. The Pauli effect had been coined after numerous instances were noted in which Pauli was present and technical equipment malfunctioned, fell, broke, or sustained unusual damage. On one occasion, in February 1950, during a visit to Princeton University, the cyclotron Pauli had come to observe inexplicably caught fire. Pauli wrote an article on the subject titled “Background Physics,” in which he discussed the relationships between physics, the conscious, and the unconscious. In homage to the Pauli effect, the SRI scientists and researchers started calling the odd occurrences that were happening around them the Geller effect.
One theory behind this phenomenon is called associationism: the philosophical idea that like a chain reaction, each experience informs or influences the next experience. This concept has been given various names across the historical record. In 400 BC, Sophocles wrote about the self-fulfilling prophecy, a prediction that directly or indirectly causes that prediction to manifest, as in Oedipus Rex. The Tinkerbell effect is a more modern way of describing situations that exist because people insist they exist. For the CIA in the 1950s, the controversial anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher studied the placebo effect, a remarkable phenomenon whereby a harmless pill or simulated treatment produces real-world physiological effects in humans. And the Thomas theorem states that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Important to this story is the fact that perception of an event or a situation—real or imagined, rational or irrational, normal or allegedly paranormal—can cause consequential actions to occur.
In the winter of 1975, Uri Geller returned to Northern California at the behest of the Livermore scientists for a series of classified psychokinesis tests. The tests were recorded on videotape, audiotape, and film. Because everyone involved with the experiment except Geller carried a top-secret Q clearance (for nuclear secrets), the Atomic Energy Commission assigned a security officer named Ron Robertson to oversee national security issues between itself, Livermore, and CIA. Kit Green served as the contract monitor for the CIA.
“The program involved half a dozen nuclear physicists and engineers,” Green confirms. Because of “ongoing security issues” (Geller was a foreign national whose potential role with the Mossad was yet unresolved), arrangements were made to test Geller off-site. The scientists set up their experiments in a laboratory adjacent to Lawrence Livermore, in an old wooden World War II barracks on University of California property.
Two sets of experiments were to take place. In the first, high-quality lasers were fired at a target. Could Geller interfere with the beam? For the second test, the scientists placed magnetic computer program cards in a lead container and sealed it. Could Geller affect what was inside? He did a series of these psychokinesis tests over several days, and the results of one of these tests was declassified. “The magnetic pattern stored in the iron oxide layer of a magnetic program card was erased,” wrote Ron S. Hawke, one of the Livermore scientists. “Further experiments are warranted.” In an interview in 2015, Kit Green summarized the Livermore group’s conclusion: “The determination was that from a close distance, Geller could affect matter and materials. But he could not do it from far away.” Yet it was not the results of the tests that were most troublesome, says Green, it was the strange effect Geller seemed to have on several of the nuclear physicists.
Each night, after finishing up their work with Geller, the Livermore scientists went home. Each morning, in keeping with nuclear clearance security protocols, the scientists were required to report anything unusual that had happened overnight. After the second day of tests, AEC security officer Ron Robertson called Kit Green at CIA headquarters. “He told me there was a serious problem,” recalls Green. Several of the nuclear weapons engineers had reported seeing things they could not rationally explain. These included “items flying across the room. Lights flashing. A six-inch ball of light, rolling down the hallway. One scientist reported seeing a flying orb,” remembers Green. “One of the scientists claimed to have seen a large raven, perched on a piece of furniture inside [his] home.” Privately, Green thought these sounded “like poltergeist events” from folklore. The AEC was concerned, and so was the CIA. “I traveled to San Francisco,” Green says, “to determine what could be causing these hallucinations. I was instructed to perform pathology tests on the Livermore scientists. Were these people going mad?”
Green flew to San Francisco and met with the scientists individually. “I examined them,” he says. “Conducted extensive interviews and tests. My conclusion? There was no pathology here. These people were straight up. These were people who had more polygraph exams each year than I had. They were not psychologically impaired.” So what was going on? One of the scientists confided in Green about a particular incident he could not get out of his mind. It happened in his bedroom, in the middle of the night. It made no rational sense, except he woke up his wife and she saw it too, Green recalls. “He told me that he saw a disincarnate arm, rotating like a hologram,” meaning an arm that was free-floating, not attached to a body. “An arm wrapped in some kind of gray cloth… instead of a hand the arm had a hook. He talked about the [horror] of seeing this hook floating over the foot of his bed. How it rotated like it was on a spit.”
Green was bedeviled. Perhaps what was going on was some kind of
psychological operation, he thought, either by an enemy intelligence service or perhaps even the CIA. “Holograms were just coming on line,” says Green, “although the technology was mostly classified at the time.” He also knew there existed a long-standing rivalry between scientists at SRI and at Livermore and remembers wondering, “Was this some kind of confidence trick?”
He confronted Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. “I asked Hal and Russ to meet me in [my] motel room,” Green recalls. “I was furious.” The scientists at Livermore were terribly upset, Green said. “The entire program was in jeopardy. I asked what in hell was going on. They swore to me they had nothing to do with any of it. My yelling was interrupted by a loud banging on the door.” Green answered the knock. “Standing in front of me in the doorway of the motel was a man in a gray suit. He asked me something. I said, ‘Wrong room,’ and started to close the door. The man turned and as he left I watched him go. I noticed there was something unusual about him.” One of the arms of his suit jacket was pinned up. “The man had one arm,” says Green. Hal Puthoff confirms that he saw it too.
Green concluded that what was going on had to have been “some kind of high-technology psychological operation,” one that involved holograms, lasers, and small unmanned aerial vehicles, all advanced technologies that were just coming online as black programs at CIA in the mid-1970s. As an intelligence officer and a neurophysiologist (not an advanced technology weapons expert), Green remembers thinking that whatever classified technology was involved, it was above his level of security clearance. But as a medical professional, he was concerned about the real-world results that transpired.